Have A Better Festival

Festivals. A three-day escape, where beery lawlessness and sleep-deprivation permeate every waking second in an all-smothering blanket of surreality. JJ Dunning cobbles together a proper welly-wearers guide…

It’s summer. Your tent is pitched, the sheep are dyed a luminous shade of pink, and you’re just about to tuck into your first bucket-o-cider. Ah, the great British outdoor music festival.
Well, that’s the idea anyhow. And it sort of works. Right up until it starts pissing it down, the toilets overflow and you run out of money.
Then there’s the people; they’re either a babble of over-excited shouting, or a staggering, sick-encrusted mess (depending on the time of day).
Moreover, these days, there are hundreds of festivals. As the competition hots up, the organisers look to the advertisers to fill the profit-margins, and our unblemished, rolling acres of joyous countryside are transformed into cash-sapping, on-message brand-circuses.
Oh, and the other side-effect: tickets are getting more expensive.
And yet, each year when they go on sale, the public mobilise themselves en masse to descend upon the websites and phone lines of the UK, jabbing F5 and redial keys with all the demented fervour of a million steroid-stuffed woodpeckers.
Are we consumerist suckers? Or just free-spirited kids on the scavenge for a listless, lawless fun-time? Is the music festival the final vestige of the free?; a valuable haven of unregulated public chaos in a society otherwise crippled by anti-smoking legislation and finger-wagging authoritarians? A chance to mix it with the great unwashed, the acid-freaks and men with braided hair without having to go down your local Wetherspoons on a Tuesday afternoon?
Or is it just, like, alright and stuff and hey my mate Neil’s going so we can drink lager til we fall over and watch Kaiser Chiefs in a tent full of drunk people and have a good old singalong.
Whatever the truth in this world of anarchy, you’re gonna need to know some basic stuff. If it’s your first festival summer, or your fiftieth, here are our top six survival tips…

#1: Festival Stereotypes
Give these weirdos a wide berth…

Crusty Man
A Levellers fan since birth, Crusty Man wears a hessian shirt hewn from discarded potato sacks. He has braided hair, and carries his child in a tie-dye sling. Smokes Cutters’ Choice. A militant vegan, he is largely placid, but may become aggressive if you eat meat near him.

Guitar Man
Guitar Man is most often heard playing Radiohead’s ‘No Surprises’ at 5am at the top of his lungs. Tuneless and drunk. Is prone to shouting and puking. Sometimes simultaneously. Avoid at all costs.

First Timer
As Guitar Man, minus the guitar. Overdoes it in first half hour of festival and spends the next two days vomiting in a tent.

Marquee Man
Marquee Man is an organised individual who gets there early to secure the best spot for his multi-acre portable pleasureplex. Expect late night barbeques, and incessant shouting and laughing as his disciples congregate through the night. Bastards.

Festival Fashionista
With her curly hippie hairdo, perfect makeup, satellite-dish-sized sunglasses and giant Hunter wellies, the Festival Fashionista hovers around the site smoking endless fags.
Watches next big thing in new bands tent, but pretends to have never heard of the headliner so as to appear cool and aloof.

Muddy Loon
“There’s no Police! No Mum & Dad! I’m gonna dive in a puddle! Waaaaaaahhh!!!!” Help me, my Moron-o-meter just broke.

#2: Tent Tension
A) Buying a tent
Face it, you’re no Ray Mears (although to be fair he probably buries himself up to his neck in peat bog in preference to sleeping in a tent). It’s time to be honest with yourself, you’re a person who lives in a house who is going to live in a field for three days. Don’t be a hero, this is not your area of expertise. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Don’t feel like you have to buy a £200 tent from Millets or Blacks or some other outdoorsy shop just to look the part. You’re never going to use it again. Instead, go to Asda and get one for £5. A friend of mine bought one of their tents for Glastonbury 2005 and although the zip broke on the second day and he had to sleep outside for two nights, it was cheap. That’s the important bit: Cheap. You hear?

B) Location, Location, Location   
You’re first in the field; congratulations, you’re a geek. Overlooking your scary organisational skills, we’ve some advice; it’s imperative that you keep your game head. Faced with the luxury of choice, too many people flip out and scamper erratically like squirrels on a dual-carriageway. Don’t be overwhelmed by the decision at hand. To help, we’ve devised the following rules that’ll help you find the best tent-pitch:

i) Stay Away From The Fence: unless you want to be crushed by perimeter-vaulting pikeys who’ve crawled Rambo-like through the undergrowth and scaled the fence to avoid paying for a ticket, or kept awake by an Amazonian torrent of weewee as people relentlessly piss up against the bastard.
 
ii) If Possible, Pitch On A Hill: that’s ON a hill, not AT THE BOTTOM OF, or ON THE TOP OF said hill. If it rains, the bottom floods, whilst the top is festival badlands, and is probably near a fence (see rule i).

iii) Stay Away From The Toilets: because they smell.

C) Groundsheets
You probably think they’re a stupid idea. They’re not. The ground is cold at night. Get one.

D)  Don’t Leave Stuff Outside
Especially wellies. Muddy or otherwise, they’ll walk o_ on their own in the night if you leave them outside. Worse still, you may come out in the morning to discover someone has used your trainer as a makeshift toilet. Yes, THIS HAPPENED.

#3: Booze
Most UK festivals won’t let you take glass into the site. This is a sensible safety concern, which handily doubles as an excellent way of making sure you spend plenty of dosh at the bar. Fortunately, some brands of spirit are now served in plastic bottles, presumably made with the discerning outdoor drinking enthusiast’s needs in mind. However, whatever you do, don’t fill a 2 litre plastic bottle with cheap Netto vodka and a bag of Skittles, then tout it around your friends as a “delicious” rainbow-coloured snifter – for your information, The Fly’s Matt Glass, it’s REVOLTING. Do, however, go out of your way to grab a box of cheap wine, remove the cardboard, then carry the shiny inner bladder around like a kind of space-age booze-sack, pausing occasionally to squeeze the little tap over your mouth in a display of opulence not seen since the last days of Rome. You’ll be the envy of everyone in the area. Unless you drink all three litres at once (very bad idea level one), and then decide that Matt Glass’s Skittles Vodka is a tasty-lookin’ tipple (very bad idea level ten). You’ll wake up in a hot tent and want to die. Trust me.

#4: Leave Early
“Oooh, you can’t leave early, we’ll miss the encore!” moans your bespectacled nerd friend, “It’s our last night, let’s go fucking mental!”, weh-heys your boggle-eyed drunk friend. Idiots, both of them. Whilst it might be a cardinal sin to leave a sporting event early, there’s lots to be said for getting out of a festival before the masses move out. There’s not much fun to be had sitting in the – ironically – baking sun amongst hundreds of stinking, hungover, festival-goers at Castle Cary station, or driving sideways through the mud as the world and his wife try to leave the car park. Plus, if you leave early, you’ll be the first to get to the service station and that towering triumph of technology hiding in a cobwebby scumhole out the back: the flushing toilet! It’s worth doing, just to park your behind on that precious porcelain. What luxury.

#5 : Festival Economy
Forget what you know about money. It’s like George Osbourne, Alistair Darling and the other one have all bumped into each other whilst carrying towering piles of Special Sums. Festival economies are reactionary, too; if it rains, you can expect to pay anything up to £30 for a pair of wellies (BRING YOUR OWN, NUMBSKULL), if it’s sunny, you can pay £200 for a pair of sunglasses, and if Starsailor are on, earplugs will set you back several grand. Worst of all, aside from the extortionate booze (see the booze section for help on this), are the outrageous food tariffs. Fancy one of those delicious-smelling pies? Or a brand new Lamborghini? It’s a straight choice.

#6 : Toilets
We’ll try not to make (many) disgusting jokes in this bit, but it’s bloody hard. A bit like your stool after three days of cereal bars and warm Carling, then? (Sorry everyone – Toilet Gags Ed). When you’re faced with the sort of third world, sans-hygiene sub-poverty sanitation of three days’ worth of drunken-people poo that is the festival portaloo, there’s just one thing you need. Wet wipes. Please, for the love of Jesus, don’t forget them.